PROGRAMMER, poet, and publisher James
Sherry ’68 takes a risk on Snowball’s Chance,
a new parody of Animal Farm with its sights set on American
foreign policy

by kim fisher ’94

James Sherry ’69 has never balked
at controversy.

Publisher, poet, and critic, Sherry is
the founder of the Segue Foundation, an umbrella arts organization
based in lower Manhattan. In addition to producing weekly
poetry readings, supporting the arts in prisons, and sponsoring
literary and visual arts journals, Segue also publishes Roof
Books, which until now produced books of poetry and literary
criticism.

Today, the “Fiction” section
of the Roof Books website lists exactly one title for sale — Snowball’s
Chance, a book that seemed to have about that big a
chance of getting published until Sherry stepped in.

When Snowball’s Chance author
John Reed approached Sherry about publishing his manuscript,
Sherry was intrigued. Snowball’s Chance is both a parodic
sequel to Orwell’s Animal Farm and a fierce,
wide-ranging, and prophetic critique of contemporary America
and American foreign policy, neither of which makes it a
likely candidate for mainstream publication. Sherry recalls
being struck by how effectively Reed had managed to parody
so many American conceits, as well as Orwell himself. “I
haven’t read a lot of good social critique lately,” Sherry
says. “John made the whole metaphor of Animal Farm work
as well against the self-interest of the ruling class in
Western countries.”

In Orwell’s original, Snowball, the
porcine Trotsky of Animal Farm, energetically set about realizing
the ideals of the new mammalian utopia until his exile by
Napoleon-cum-Stalin. In Reed’s parody, Snowball returns
with a new revolutionary fervor—corporate capitalism—and
transforms Animal Farm into Animal Fair, one big moneymaking
carnival. Under his leadership, Animal Farm’s dictum, “All
animals are equal, but some are more equal than others” mutates
into “All animals are born equal—what they become
is their own affair.” The animals become rich, fat,
and litigious, and divisions widen between classes and species.